The D-Word's life is one of glamour and riches, as only a documentary filmmaker can live it

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Date: Fri, 18 Sep 1998 04:44:46 -0400
To: Dana Atchley
From: Doug Block
Subject: Home Page remarks

Hey Dana,

As promised, here are the remarks for you to read on my behalf after the Home Page screening tonight.

It’s hard to say whether it would be better to read them before, during or after Justin talks, I’ll leave that up to you. I plan to add some links and post it on my Web site later today so you could simply direct anyone interested to go there, instead. Again, it’s up to you-- it’s my film but your show.

Many thanks...
Doug

Greetings, everyone!

I’m extremely sorry I can’t be there with you in person tonight. Not just because I’ll miss your reactions to the film, but because I’ll miss out on the whole experience of the festival, which I really came to appreciate when I was there two years ago stalking Justin with my camera.

I’m at this event in New York City called the Independent Feature Film Market, trying to stir up interest among festival programmers and distributors and entice them to come to the first industry screening of Home Page next Wednesday. Tonight’s the opening night party and as Dana reads this (assuming he reads this) I’m no doubt swigging a beer in some incredibly hot, crowded, deafeningly noisy room, trying to describe the film you just saw in 25 words or less to some industry honcho whose knowledge of the Web, I fear, begins and ends at ESPN.com.

Going into sales mode after being in post-production for so long isn’t really that hard-- in fact, it’s a huge relief. It forces you to speak well of your baby, after months and months of obsessing and whining over all the little things that aren’t working and all of the endless details involved in fixing them up. It feels good to feel good about my film again.

As far as distribution goes, though, I guess I’m a bit ambivalent. I’ve always intended Home Page to be for the widest possible audience and not just for those who “get” the Internet.

On the other hand, it’s such a personal film that I occasionally wonder how widely I actually want it to get out there. It’s kind of like that scene in the film: do I really want the world entering my home to that degree? Who doesn’t want professional attention, but do I want to lose my privacy in the process? You’d think I’d have come to terms with these questions in the course of making the film, but it’s not something I dwelt on, any more than I worried about whether or not audiences would like me in the film. You have to distance yourself, think of yourself as another character in the story. Only now do the personal repercussions come home to roost.

Anyway, I want to thank Dana both for inviting me to show the film and for allowing me free reign to shoot there with Justin. As fellow storytellers, I hope you’ll appreciate that part of the art of storytelling is to avoid slowing down the narrative with irrelevant details. Like explaining that the scene with Justin and Abbe reacting to the Rolling Stone article actually took place in Crested Butte, Colorado and not San Francisco. Sorry about that Dana.

I want to make a few comments about my film both to give you a few insights into its creation and because I think it’s a bit unfair for Justin to have to speak for it. Of course, Justin will do just fine up there on his own, and have lots of fascinating opinions, I’m sure, but the one thing he can’t do is speak for my intentions.

I hope it’s clear that it was never my intention to make the definitive film about the Web. I think that would be impossible anyway: the Web changes so fast the footage would have been dated before I took the tape out of the camera. I was always much more interested in just telling a story. And in documentary storytelling, the great challenge is to find compelling “characters” to tell your story through.

I suppose the best way I can describe Home Page is simply: it’s a story about what happened after I first discovered the Web. And what happened was I hated all the commercial shit but loved hypertext, and I found myself totally and unapologetically drawn to the personal home pages, or at least the better ones. I was especially impressed by Julie Petersen’s original site, Awaken, which I found before I’d ever heard of this kid named Justin.

The series of letters that Julie posted about her affair with Patrick, which she titled Letters From the Dead, were fascinating enough, but it was in following the hypertext link to Patrick’s own running account (which he’s since removed) that gave me my first great Web Epiphany. Stories about affairs have been done a million times, but when else in the history of mankind could an affair be told from both points of view in running time with reader feedback and encouragement!!!

I think more than anything, it was that initial thrill over the medium’s potential to link and interconnect and tell multiple stories with multiple points-of-view that inspired me to pick up my hi-8 camcorder and try to somehow capture the Web on film. But, again, I knew it had to be through personal stories.
Meeting Justin, and discovering how well connected he was, gave me a possible structure for conveying the Web’s non-linearity within the framework of a linear story. Then I just had to follow Justin and hope he would eventually lead me to the promised land. When I learned that he once worked under Julie Petersen at HotWired, I knew the planets were aligning properly for me. And when I found out Justin was cutting short his road trip to work for Howard in San Francisco, I was ecstatic because it gave me an organic way to work Julie’s story into the film. Of course, in order to recreate my Web experience, I knew I needed to talk to Patrick, as well. And to convey the real-life consequences of Julie’s affair, I needed to interview her camera-shy husband, Jim, which was probably the single biggest challenge of the entire filming period.

It’s interesting that when my editor, Debbie Rosenberg, began to cut the film (from what turned out to be over 120 hours of footage), she instinctively gravitated to the section with Julie and Patrick first. She intuited what I also felt-- that their story is the emotional core of the film, and that it resonates throughout the rest of the film. Without it I think you’d have a considerably harder time understanding Justin’s search for intimacy. And mine, as well.

Despite all the footage I shot with Justin, once Debbie and I decided to focus on this theme, his storyline came together relatively quickly. It was my own evolving storyline that was really difficult and time-consuming.

Although it seems obvious now, given her impact in the film, it's ironic that my wife wasn’t even in it for the longest time. I had the mistaken impression that Marjorie didn’t want anything to do with being on camera, when in fact she was hurt that I spent so much time taping my daughter and so little focused on her. It’s almost the flip of the women in Justin’s life who didn’t, yet really did, want to be written up in his web diary. Anyway, her interview was done last, and we continued to restructure where she appeared in the film almost to the very end.

Based on the few screenings we’ve had to date, quite a number of really bright people have opined that Marjorie’s presence, albeit brief, is the most powerful and affecting part of the film. Only one person has disagreed, to date. Unfortunately, she’s the sole programmer of American indie films for the Toronto Film Festival:

"I thought the subject was great & the kids were interesting, especially yr young star. But I thought it was long and would have been stronger if you had just gone for the subject, rather than involving yr own personal family troubles which seemed to me to be not clearly enough related to the subject and a bit on the McElwee side."

Pardon me while I vent for a moment.

Now, the misreading of my personal family troubles aside, I can live with her saying almost anything about Marjorie’s presence in the film except that it somehow made me go off the subject. Ultimately, she IS the subject. Discovering the Web, meeting these fascinating people through it, being inspired to develop my own Web site, wrestling with the personal consequences, and coming to an epiphany about my own most intimate relationship... well, if that story arc isn’t the subject of the film then somebody please take me out and shoot me.

Or shoot this woman.

Ah, well. If I had to choose between making a splash in Toronto or paying tribute to my wife, guess which way I’m happy to go?

Oh, by the way, this "bit on the McElwee side" refers to Ross McElwee, the (almost) universally-acknowledged master of first-person documentary filmmaking. The comparison is dead wrong, but it’s the best backhanded compliment of my professional career.

Ok, I’m starting to ramble on. You’re lucky I’m not there in person, after all.

Of course, you can read about all this on The D-Word, which is now, amazingly (to me, at least), in its third year. At first, I figured the journal would be a nice way to attract interest in the film, as well as an oh-so-clever way of writing about myself without having to delve too deeply into my personal life. I thought I’d keep it focused on the making of the film and targeted mainly to other filmmakers, particularly documentarians, as a kind of running illustration of the angst of the filmmaking process (along with the occasional joys).

What I didn’t count on was how much I would rely on the journal entries to work through my issues and entanglements -- both professional and personal. And I didn’t count on getting such encouraging feedback from readers, particularly as the entries grew more personal. It helped free me from my fears of making the film more personal, so in a sense it actually changed the content of the film, and I think much for the better.

My goal now is to get the industry and press to understand that Home Page is a story that takes place in two mediums. The film stands on its own, but it’s just a small part of a much larger story that continues to play out on the Web. That’s why I decided to put up everyone’s url at the end, rather than the usual brief update. I want audiences to go to the their web sites-- go to links.net (and now bud.com), go to rheingold.com, go to awaken.org. And if you go to The D-Word, I’m gonna do everything in my power to entice you to visit these sites. You want to find out more about Justin? Great-- hit one of the many links and bon voyage. I hope you have a lot of time on your hands.

Speaking of Justin, my other regret in not being there today is that I won’t get the chance to hear him speak about the film. In all the time I was making the film, Justin actually wrote very little about it on his site, which I found quite curious. Of course, I did everything I could to downplay Justin’s role in the film, not wanting to make him feel too self-concious or self-important, but this was going too far! Could he really be that blasé about the experience, or was he worried that writing about it too much would somehow contaminate the process? Or was he simply so wise that he was allowing me the room to make my film without too much self-referential interference? I look forward to hearing what Justin has to say about these things, and just about anything else he has to say, for that matter.

I’ve loved the time I spent hanging out with Justin. I’ve learned almost everything I know about the Web from him, and if I’ve become a semi-celebrated Web presence, it’s merely because I've hung out with him on his site, as well-- reading his words for hours and hours, noting his playful and witty way with links, and absorbing his teachings.

My affection for Justin goes well beyond the Web, though. His infectious spirit and enthusiasm and passion for life has been an inspiration to me for well over two years now. It was a privilege to see him grow so much during the time I filmed with him and it’s a privilege to help introduce him soon to a wider audience through Home Page.

And now, it's back to the market I go. I'd like to say stay tuned for exciting updates-- it's gonna be a really interesting week-- but I think I know better than to make promises.

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